Ghostwriters scandal haunts Spanish novelist's Nobel reputation

A literary storm broke in Spain yesterday as one of the country's most distinguished authors - the Nobel prizewinner, Camilo Jose Cela - was accused of regularly using ghostwriters for most of his career.

The allegations made by Tomas Garcia Yebra include not just the recent works of Cela, who died in January at 85 and won his Nobel in 1989, but stretch back to his early classics.

The biggest scandal, however, surrounds the ghostwriters used to help produce The Cross of Saint Andrew and Mazurka for Two Dead Men which won him, respectively, Spain's £250,000 Planeta prize and Spain's National Literary Prize.

In these books, according to Mr Yebra, the ghostwriters supplied the plots and characters which Cela transformed into his own prose style. "Cela was a great prose writer with an exquisite style but plots and arguments were not his strong point," he said.

Mr Yebra named two ghostwriters, Marcial Suarez and Mariano Tudela, who, he claimed, had worked on the prize-winning books. Both men, themselves writers, are also dead. Suarez had also provided Cela with the stories and characters for one of his most famous books, 1951's The Hive, according to Mr Yebra.

Mr Yebra, a journalist, made his discoveries while researching his book, Undoing Cela.

The Planeta prize was the biggest cheat of all, Mr Yebra claims. A storyline and the main characters were lifted from an unpublished novel that was also entered for the competition and the Nobel prizewinner, who had been promised the award, turned around a Cela-style book at short notice.

Mr Yebra said yesterday that it was "a vile trick. The Planeta was fixed in advance. They had their novelist, all they needed was a novel. Cela was always interested in human stupidity. It was completely consistent of him to think that, if people were going to promise him vast sums of money to churn something out, he should go ahead and do so".

Cela later put his name to guide books and promotional materials written entirely by ghostwriters, Mr Yebra said.